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The production of knowledge is a mobile process. Efforts to conceptualise the mobilities of knowledge draw on a wide range of metaphors to conceptualise the ways in which knowledge moves and changes as it moves. In this paper, I present the theoretical origins and methodological implications – often tied to specific disciplines – of concepts in use. I distinguish between sedentarist metaphors (construction, transfer) and mobile metaphors (focusing on translation, contagion, friction, and circulation). I show that, although all these metaphors share a common attention to knowledge as mobile, they are neither synonymous nor interchangeable. They each structure how we think about and research epistemic mobilities in their own way. I find that mobile metaphors in particular are most compatible with, and can contribute to, the development of the mobile ontology that characterises the mobilities turn. I illustrate this using a case study of the epistemic mobilities of the idea of climate migration in the French context. From this example, I draw key lessons for studies of epistemic mobilities. I argue for a diverse, nuanced conceptual vocabulary of epistemic mobilities, leading to a nuanced, relational understanding of space, scale, and how to trace the mobilities of knowledge in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper considers doctoral candidate mindset and effective doctoral supervision. I explore mindset through a Critical Mobilities lens to posit two mindsets that candidates inhabit on their doctoral journey: transit and connectivity (Kesselring, (2006). Pioneering mobilities: New patterns of movement and motility in a mobile world. Environment & Planning A, 38(2), 269–279. ). I suggest management of doctoral research in the UK and internationally predisposes doctoral candidates and their supervisors to a 'transit mindset' which focuses on completion. On the other hand, a 'connectivity mindset' of exploration better enables critical and creative thinking. While both mindsets are necessary for the production of a high-quality thesis, a connectivity mindset can be more uncomfortable for both supervisors and doctoral candidates in the context of the neoliberal performance management culture. With the aim of supporting better doctoral research and doctoral experience, the paper theorises three manifestations of connectivity mindset that supervisors may encounter. These are: 'rhizomic thinking' which the supervisory team can identify and support in their supervisee; the 'nomadic space' which is created between supervisor and supervisee when they share a connectivity mindset; and a 'third space' that is entered into by supervisors and supervisees, when a shared connectivity mindset incorporates personal experiences, feelings and needs. The paper concludes with six areas of focus for development of supervisory practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances the epistemological potential that exists at the nexus of queer theory and mobilities research. It aims to queer mobility by rejecting the idea of the destination and embracing the virtuality of movement instead. In doing so, it draws on the queer symbolism of the closet and the cruise to highlight the heteronormative framing that has come to define and constrain the new mobilities paradigm. Arguing that anybody has the capacity to be 'queer', it calls for a redefinition of the subject and an exploration of the world-making possibilities that emerge when the virtuality of movement is foregrounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Drawing from the New Mobility Paradigm, tourist cities embody more complexity than mere dichotomies of ‘hosts’ versus ‘guests.’ They are the result of multiple users of urban space overlapping in a highly mobile and hyper-nomadic society. By combining mobile positioning-based data, various official surveys, and the interpolation of census data, this article measures the relative weight of the different users of the city of Barcelona in 2019 and their distribution both temporally and spatially. Results indicate that the absolute value of different types of visitors is much higher than official data suggest, but their relative value is conditioned by the high volume of other forms of mobility. The tension between users generates very diverse spatial responses, ranging from coexistence to exclusion.

This paper reconsiders the new mobilities paradigm and its relevance for the understanding of transport systems and behaviour. It argues that the mobilities field will gain from more systematically drawing on conceptual and empirical insights from psychology to complement insights as mostly derived from sociology, geography, innovation studies, anthropology, cultural studies and continental philosophy. Focused on the car as one of the most dominant objects of individual consumption, it examines psychology epistemologies that are different from those that prevail in the mobilities literature. Transport systems shape and are shaped by social and personal identities, fears and anxieties, trauma and phobia; aggression and rebellion; and the search for community and companions. These aspects have been debated in the mobilities literature, but transport psychology investigates the more fundamental motives and conditions underlying the systems, processes and practices that shape transport behaviour. This paper discusses interrelationships and common ground between the mobilities and psychology literatures, and elaborates on the specific contributions made by social, evolutionary and clinical psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between mobility and place-making in the context of tourism based on the new mobilities paradigm has been explored. Taking road travel on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway in southwestern China as a case, auto-ethnography and mobile ethnography are employed as the primary research methods, along with in-depth interviews, observations, personal travel log writings, and second-hand data collection. The question that how the space of road becomes a meaningful place through the mobility of road travellers thus has been answered. The mobility pattern of travellers is found to be stable in the time dimension and there are periodic repetitions in the spatial dimension, making 'place-ballet' on the highway. Accordingly, the road changes from space of flows into a place that is richly endowed with meaning. The travellers' imagination of the road plays an important role in their interactions with the road, helping them making the meaning of the road. Multiple mobility practices shape the traveller's 'sense of the road'. In particular, the road is not a homogenous space in motion, but a 'wrinkled' one with numerous anchoring points. These moorings such as restaurants, hostels and landmarks shape travellers' emotional connection with the road. Proactive or forced stillness not only affect the pace of the traveller's mobility, but also broadens their understanding of the road and road travel. Therefore, the meaning attributed to the road is constructed by the mobility and the moorings. Accordingly, a comprehensive understanding of road travel, which is a distinct form of mobility practice, is generated. Moreover, the understanding of roads as a space of flows has been deepened and the significance of travel channels within mobility studies is highlighted. Finally, roads are regarded as a meaning place, which contributes to forming a 'mobile concept' of the place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transportation has been identified as one of the major barriers to successful reentry for prisoners released to community in the United States. We foregrounded transportation and mobility in our design consistent with the new mobilities paradigm and investigated the mobility needs of returning citizens from the perspective of service providers and employers in Dallas, Texas. We interviewed 17 participants who directly served returning citizens in their professional roles as part of a conventional content analytic design that focused specifically on transportation and mobility among their clients. The findings include five primary themes: 1) Returning citizens rely primarily on public transit; 2) Access to cars is rare, complicated, but advantageous; 3) Support lays a road to successful reentry; 4) Transportation is critical for successful reentry, and; 5) Returning citizens face a complex network of obligations. We utilized mobilities literature and assemblage thinking to interpret our findings as an expansion of the carceral mobilities literature both conceptually and geo-spatially as a reentry mobility assemblage. The paper concludes with a consideration of the possibilities for social service practice, research, and pedagogy through a mobilities lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing the relations of communities and places in sparsely located rural areas, this article argues that rural community is not a stable unity tied to a place, but a phenomenon closely tied to its members’ connections to the interdependent concept of urban/rural, especially in terms of their mobility practices. In this study, the new mobilities paradigm was applied to reveal how everyday relational and routine aspects connected to material, structural, socio-cultural and economic conditioning dynamically intertwine to form a rural community. The analysis is based on three regional case studies in Estonian sparsely populated areas, which are diverse in terms of geographical location, demographic composition, type of settlement, history, and welfare conditions. By using qualitative in-depth interviews with people (N=60) who were involved with the locations, the article analyses everyday mobilities in these communities, especially in terms of interrelatedness to structural, social and material factors. The study has brought out interrelated themes that are connected to the use of rural representations in terms of individual and social self-reflection, the importance of social and material infrastructures, and the dynamics of these borders in communities and shaping community relations.

This article makes the case for including frameworks of media ecology and mobilities research in the shaping of critical robotics research for a human-centered and holistic lens onto robot technologies. The two meta-disciplines, which align in their attention to relational processes of communication and movement, provide useful tools for critically exploring emerging human–robot dimensions and dynamics. Media ecology approaches human-made technologies as media that can shape the way we think, feel, and act. Relatedly, mobilities research highlights various kinds of influential movement and stillness of people, things, and ideas. The emerging field of critical robotics research can benefit from such attention to the ways of thinking, feeling, and moving robotic forms and environments encourage and discourage. Drawing on various studies into robotics, I illustrate those conceptual alignments of media ecology, mobilities, and critical robotics research and point to the value of this interdisciplinary approach to robots as media and robotics as socio-cultural environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The destructive bushfires in Australia 2019–2020 resonate with similar trends around the world as bushfire seasons are becoming longer and more pervasive. Yet, criminological analyses of bushfires are limited and tend to focus on the individual criminal subject and the act of arson, the crime of intentional fire starting. Encouragingly, green criminology, the criminological perspective dealing with environmental crimes and harms, is expanding the categories of offenders and victims of harm by, for example, highlighting non-human victims and harms perpetrated by the capitalist system. Nonetheless, even this perspective is inadequate to deal with the complex and ultimately mobile events of fire and their far-reaching consequences. This article brings green criminology in flux by drawing from the 'new mobilities paradigm', emphasising motion, temporality and the mobility of contemporary life. The new mobilities paradigm, or the 'mobility turn', has a lot to offer green criminology as is demonstrated here by way of scrutinising the mobility of fire. A mobile green criminology will help trace fire beyond static categories of offenders and victims and open up for more flexible and mobile categories of environmental harms as constructed, complex and unstable processes. Finally, a mobile analysis allows for a more complex and meaningful reading of criminological space, demonstrated by the relationship between social, aesthetic and cultural values of land, politics, power and fire-related behaviours, such as fire suppression or Aboriginal peoples' cultural burning practices. It is argued here that in order to understand the complex nature of fire, green criminology must attune to the intersections between fire, space, mobility and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores colonial (dis-)continuities between the planned Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) development corridor and the Uganda Railway (UR). The historical approach to infrastructure studies highlights the effects of large-scale infrastructures beyond their immediate material impact, and reveals their potential power to structure mobilities, historicities and politics of scale. With reference to relational theories, it is argued that the two projects gain their respective significance not only through their ability to connect distant places, but also by blocking and severing other competing ways of being mobile. Particularly, both infrastructure projects create technologies enabling easier and faster flow of capital and commodities but limit previously prevalent mobilities practised by caravans and semi-nomadic people in the region. Both projects, furthermore, produce particular ways of remembering the past and anticipating the future. The article identifies a major discontinuity in the politics of scale they respectively imply: while the UR aimed at producing a clear scalar hierarchy between empire and colony, the LAPSSET alleges to dissolve hard boundaries between scalar instances. This article is based on qualitative data collected during fieldwork along the proposed route of the LAPSSET corridor, as well as archive work regarding the UR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores doctoral candidates' experiences of making progress through the doctoral space. We engage concepts associated with the 'new mobilities' paradigm (Urry, J. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press) to provide insight into the candidate experience of the doctoral journey; exploring specifically the interplay between the fixed structure provided by institutional-level progression frameworks that are commonly implemented by UK universities to measure 'timely progress' across disciplines and the borderlands space that enables and facilitates intellectual freedom, creativity, becoming and adventure. Drawing on notions of 'moorings', 'home on the move', 'connectivity and transit spaces' and 'rhizomic thinking' we analyse narrative data generated through the reflective diaries of doctoral candidates at a modern university in the English Midlands to offer new insight into how universities can provide better doctoral education, that supports: candidates to make a contribution to knowledge; protects well-being; and facilitates timely completion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we suggest (im)mobility biography as a method for reconstructing human (im)mobilities and related negotiations of meanings of place, time and social interaction. Based on biographical-narrative approaches and participatory ideals the combination of life history interviewing with a participatory timeline tool is the best fit for capturing individuals' life-worlds over time. After presenting theoretical presuppositions on relational meanings of place, time and social interaction, we provide an overview of biographical and participatory research in the context of human (im)mobilities and sketch methodological origins of the life history interview and the timeline tool. Furthermore, we address issues essential for planning and preparing (im)mobility biography, and demonstrate two different applications of the method in migration contexts in Germany and Ecuador. Subsequently, we present options for analysis and interpretation of textual and graphical data outputs. Keeping in mind strengths and challenges, we consider (im)mobility biography a valuable method for capturing (im)mobile life-worlds as well as contextual embeddedness of individual decision-making on moving or staying. Especially in terms of its participatory orientation, the visualization of migration trajectories facilitates structuration and memorization of life histories, allows for shared analysis even at the interview stage, and encourages participants to reflect on their biographies.

The construction workforce and its relationship with the resources industries is an under-researched sector of the mobile labour market. While it is broadly assumed that the construction workforce is an integral part of the resources industry, those with a familiarity with resource boomtowns perceive the construction workforce to be different or 'other', mostly viewing the workers to be socially, economically and culturally inferior with different values, practices and rewards. The 'new mobilities paradigm' and Employment-Related Geographical Mobility provide useful frameworks to examine the nuances of mobile workers, placing mobility at the centre of an assessment of paid work and socio-economic differentiation in Western Australian resources boomtown settings. The lived experience of construction workers and their families are interrogated providing an insight into the complex and unequal 'relatedness' of the sector to the resources industries, another sector employing a mobile workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary work is increasingly mobile, sparking new challenges for scholars of work and organizations. In this review article, we argue that a 'mobilities lens' offers strong potential for rethinking established approaches, focusing on one important sub-field: work–family studies. Drawing on a 'problematization' approach (Sandberg and Alvesson, 2011) and a systematic literature review (SLR) of work–family research published from 1995 to 2015, we show how theoretical assumptions about time, space, and place have narrowed the scope of work–family studies, focusing attention on 'time' and 'time-binds', and a limited subset of mobilities (e.g. telework, commuting). We argue that a mobilities lens can help us 'think differently' about work–family dynamics, prompting theoretical and methodological reorientations that recognize the inextricable connection of time and space (as 'time–space') and the need for a more encompassing excavation of the power, practice, and meaning of employment-related mobility (ERM) in work–family life. We sketch out a 'mobilities inspired' agenda to illustrate how ideas from mobilities studies can enrich work–family inquiry. We also discuss how mobilities studies can benefit, in turn, from greater engagement with work–family and organizational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars of mobility employ the concepts of assemblage, practice and intensive force. This paper argues that site ontological analysis is a productive way to understand the ways these phenomenon work together. The importance of practice organization to such a differential ontology is emphasized. A case study of an automobile journey on the Pennsylvania Turnpike illustrates how a momentary stranding in the driving event modified the site's practices, temporalities, subjectivities and intensivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Africa, development corridors – networks of roads, railways, pipelines and ports that facilitate the movement of commodities between landlocked production areas, processing zones and global markets – are being built at an unprecedented pace. In mainstream development discourse, these mega-infrastructure projects have been framed as an effective way of creating conditions that are attractive to investors while simultaneously driving inclusive economic growth and development. Yet, recent geographic research on new development corridors has revealed certain tensions and inconsistencies in this win–win narrative, drawing attention to cases where the spatial reorganization of land that has accompanied corridor development has introduced new patterns of spatial exclusion and immobility. This article shows how approaching the study of development corridors using the new mobility paradigm – paying attention to uneven and conflicting mobilities along new corridor routes – stands to generate important empirical and theoretical insights about peoples' lived experiences with corridors, as well as about the trajectories of power enacted through corridor development. Ultimately, it is argued that applying the new mobilities paradigm in future research on development corridors may help researchers to better understand emergent forms of spatial exclusion and immobility created by new corridors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the paper is to discuss, from a multigenerational perspective, the (im)mobilities of older Pakistani women migrants in the UK and the material culture of gift-giving, which moves with (and without) them to and from the ancestral homeland of Pakistan. A multigenerational perspective allows us to comprehend the collective importance of the mobilities of older Pakistani female migrants in upholding the culturally significant ritualistic custom of gift-giving. The research is situated within the theoretical context of the 'New Mobilities Paradigm' to understand the mobility patterns of older migrants and the mobilisation of material culture. We find that the process of coordinating and exchanging gifts leads to a great deal of physical mobility, within localities and national spaces, but also internationally across different diasporic locations. In doing so, older Pakistani women migrants perform an important role as 'gift agents' in the host and home countries, assuring their own social status as well as that of their families. Importantly, the resulting mobility of older Pakistani women empowers their less mobile peers to also participate in gift-giving. This paper concludes by extending the concept of 'mobility practices' to include the mobility of gifts as a practice, which can compensate for physical immobility in older age due to ill-health, fragility, or other factors. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the importance of various (im)mobilities that were induced by the massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal on 25 April 2015. It analyzes over 120 news articles published in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, arranging these into a mobility-centric narrative that highlights the politics of movement in the disaster’s wake. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological “mobilities turn”, I introduce the concept of linked (im)mobilities to demonstrate the complex dialectics structuring (im)mobilities after the disaster. More specifically, Nepal’s post-earthquake (im)mobilities intersected with one another and with a variety of geographic and political factors to produce a mutually constitutive web of contingent movements. Attending to these not only underscores the centrality of (im)mobilities themselves. By raising questions of scale, inequality, bordering, and “islanding”, the approach advanced here widens our analytical frame. It offers a conceptual architecture capable of encompassing more factors (beyond mobility), thereby facilitating a broader understanding of the disaster event and its various outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term cybercafé has been widely used to refer to social spaces designed to provide access to computers and the internet. Described as a type of technospace where technology and human interaction are closely intertwined, cybercafés assume many designs and undertake different functions in society. Current literature on cybercafés in developing countries addresses mainly issues of access to the internet (the digital divide), the role of intermediaries and the learning that takes place. We complement these works by analyzing the different practices performed in three cybercafés in Mexico. Our empirical data is drawn from participant observations and interviews with customers and the staff of the cybercafés observed. Drawing from the New Mobilities Paradigm, our analysis explores the flows people, objects and networks in each place. Additionally, we consider the transformations experienced at these places and suggest that these changes respond to a mixed business model as well as to the intersection of particular objects, trajectories and situations that coalesced at different moments in these cybercafés. We argue that cybercafés are continually evolving and finding new ways to survive as technospaces where consumers find various forms of technology, goods and resources, and where interesting ways of social interactions are taking place.

This paper addresses the concern of data in line with transport geography. Focusing mainly on data availability, it highlights how data on both transport and spaces are important to transport geography. More and more data are becoming available on infrastructures and scheduled services, although often expensive, and on spaces. In contrast, non-scheduled services, freight transport and the demand remain or are becoming largely unknown. This opens and closes doors to transport geographers, paradoxically at the time when post-modernist postures tend to despise figures.

Tourism researchers are beginning to explore the implications of the “New Mobilities Paradigm” for improving our understanding of several aspects of tourism. This paper employs a study conducted at the intersection of this new mobilities paradigm, a consideration of destination community well-being, and the analysis of tourism sustainability through an examination of its positive and negative impacts on destinations. It describes a qualitative investigation of tourism impacts on community well-being in three Australian destinations that revealed six distinct types of tourists each characterised by different patterns of mobility. Types included Archetypal Tourists, Grey Nomads, Green Nomads, Backpackers, Temporary Workers and Amenity Migrants. The study found that patterns of impacts could be connected to these distinct types of tourists. Four key themes were identified and described – the consistent linkages between mobility variables and tourism impacts, the perceptions of tourists and tourism as providing resources for destination communities, the modification of impacts as a result of the physical, social and economic characteristics of destination communities and the emergence of conflicts and collisions between different types of tourists and residents in shared spaces. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for sustainable tourism planners and researchers, and especially for resident perceptions research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Most existing research about postcards focuses merely on their visual representation, but postcards offer more than only images and texts. We analyse 134 postcards sent from Smyrna between 1895 and 1922 by discussing five interdependent mobilities constituting the New Mobilities Paradigm (Urry, 2000, 2007), namely mobility of objects, corporeal, imaginative, communicative and virtual mobility, and pertaining systems enabling them. We aim to show the empirical richness of postcards and a way of looking at them through the concept of mobilities. By this we uncover who were the people sending postcards, for what purposes, which places postcards connected through images and words, and how did postcards function as ordering artefacts in the pre-telephone and internet era. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This first report on mobilities outlines some aspects of research on mobilities that differentiates it from and connects it to earlier, ongoing geographies of movement such as transport geography. In the context of a world on the move it seeks to bring us up to date with the mobilities turn and make a case for mobility research as a project which focuses on the universal but always particularly constructed fact of moving. Mobilities research is compared to and differentiated from work in transport geography, arguing that mobilities research takes a more holistic view that allows it to make some previously unlikely connections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Starting from a behind-the-scenes tour preceding the opening of the recent Getty exhibition Icons from Sinai, this article seeks to destabilize traditional notions of sacred space as a territorially fixed entity defined through a binary opposition to the profane. Icons and other 'travelling' sacred objects are regarded as vehicles for the circulation and displacement of holy places outside of their physical boundaries and for the reconfiguration of sacred space in new, hybrid forms. The paper thus suggests a reconceptualization of sacred space in relational terms, as the product of human and non-human interactions and networked flows, and of 'sacred places' as 'reassuring anchors' (both territorial and imaginative) within a world of fluid global networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Wellman's classic “Community Question” this paper offers a theoretical framework with which to examine contemporary community formation and the doctrine of social mix, which finds form in the renewal of stigmatized public housing estates in Australia and the United Kingdom. Proponents of “social mix” argue that geographic propinquity of social groups “elevates” lower-class values through contact with more affluent residents, providing them with greater access to social capital, employment opportunities and other resources. The Community Question incorporates three perspectives: Community Lost, Community Saved and Community Liberated. Where both the Lost and Saved perspectives examine community from the position of geographical propinquity, the Liberated perspective inquires directly into the structure and network of primary ties, finding that most social ties are not dense, tightly bounded solidarities but sparse, loosely bounded networks. Thus community is “liberated” from being restricted to interpersonal affiliations based on geographic propinquity alone. Three interrelated aspects which give viability to the “liberated community” are discussed: the production of social space, the principle of homophily, and the influence of communicative technology. The latter is examined through the “new mobilities paradigm” which emphasizes differential access to mobilities resources. The paper concludes by probing the implications for policies of “social mix” underpinned by sedentarist notions of community which normalize stability, meaning and place rather than dynamic networks in social space. It does this with reference to public housing regeneration programs in Australia, which rest on the doctrine of social mix to promote positive interactions between disparate residential groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term cybercafé has been widely used to refer to social spaces designed to provide access to computers and the internet. Described as a type of technospace where technology and human interaction are closely intertwined, cybercafés assume many designs and undertake different functions in society. Current literature on cybercafés in developing countries addresses mainly issues of access to the internet (the digital divide), the role of intermediaries and the learning that takes place. We complement these works by analyzing the different practices performed in three cybercafés in Mexico. Our empirical data is drawn from participant observations and interviews with customers and the staff of the cybercafés observed. Drawing from the New Mobilities Paradigm, our analysis explores the flows people, objects and networks in each place. Additionally, we consider the transformations experienced at these places and suggest that these changes respond to a mixed business model as well as to the intersection of particular objects, trajectories and situations that coalesced at different moments in these cybercafés. We argue that cybercafés are continually evolving and finding new ways to survive as technospaces where consumers find various forms of technology, goods and resources, and where interesting ways of social interactions are taking place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]